• Question: What is gravity made of?

    Asked by becky1997 to Katy, Nathalie, Paula on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Gravity isn’t technically made of anything, it’s a phenomenon that means objects with mass are attracted to one another. Isaac Newton was one of the first people to come up with a theory about what gravity was and how it worked – it was while apparently sitting under and apple tree and watching an apple fall from a branch and to the ground that got his mind going!

      His theory – Newton’s law of universal gravitation – states that “every massive particle in the universe attracts every other massive particle with a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them”. How he got this from an apple falling from a tree i will never know!

      Newton’s theory suggests that gravity is a universal phenomenon and is the reason why the moon orbits Earth and Earth orbits the sun, i.e. being attracted to obkjects with greater mass.

      Einstein later suggested that gravity was due to the curvature of space-time…..and it’s usually about this time that my brain starts to bleed…..;-)

    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Becky

      Gravity isn’t really “made” of anything… it’s a force, an attraction that pulls 2 objects to each other.

      If you have 2 objects, one will pull the other towards it and vice-versa. But the strength of the pulling depends on the mass of each object. Because the Earth’s mass is so much bigger than our mass, we are effectively pulled towards it – that’s gravity!

      Hope that made it clear! 😉

    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi there again,

      You are keeping me busy this morning 🙂 We do not know what gravity “is” in any fundamental way, we only know how it behaves. There are some theories – one of them saying that gravity is made of gravitons, but nothing has been proved so far. Another hot question that shows how many things we still don’t know 😉

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